Growth of Light Seed Black Holes in the Early Universe
arXiv:2601.14395 · doi:10.1038/s41550-025-02767-5
Abstract
Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have uncovered supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with masses exceeding at redshifts , posing significant challenges to existing models of early black hole formation and growth. Here we show, in a fully cosmological setting, that light seed black holes (LSBHs), remnants of Population III stars, can grow rapidly to in the early Universe. This growth is enabled by our novel black hole seeding prescription and the unprecedented resolution of our zoom-in cosmological simulations, which resolve the dense environments necessary for efficient accretion. Our results provide robust evidence that LSBHs can attain the masses required to serve as the dominant progenitors of the SMBH population observed at later cosmic epochs. These findings have far-reaching implications for the interpretation of JWST observations and future gravitational wave detections with LISA.
16 pages, 4 figures, 8 extended data figures. Published in Nature Astronomy
References in corpus (21)
- A unified model for AGN feedback in cosmological simulations of structure formation
- Direct cosmological simulations of the growth of black holes and galaxies
- A Global Three Dimensional Radiation Magneto-hydrodynamic Simulation of Super-Eddington Accretion Disks
- The Formation of Population III Binaries from Cosmological Initial Conditions
- Accretion onto the First Stellar Mass Black Holes
- Super-Critical Growth of Massive Black Holes from Stellar-Mass Seeds
- Population III star formation in a Lambda CDM universe, II: Effects of a photodissociating background
- Rapid growth of seed black holes in the early universe by supra-exponential accretion
- Off the Beaten Path: A New Approach to Realistically Model The Orbital Decay of Supermassive Black Holes in Galaxy Formation Simulations
- Modelling the supernova-driven ISM in different environments
- The erratic dynamical life of black hole seeds in high-redshift galaxies
- The formation of direct collapse black holes under the influence of streaming velocities
- Formation sites of Population III star formation: The effects of different levels of rotation and turbulence on the fragmentation behavior of primordial gas
- Seeding Black Holes in Cosmological Simulations
- How an improved implementation of H2 self-shielding influences the formation of massive stars and black holes
- Fragmentation induced starvation in Population III star formation: a resolution study
- Trapping of HII regions in Population III star formation
- Hyper-Eddington Black Hole Growth in Star-Forming Molecular Clouds and Galactic Nuclei: Can It Happen?
- From dark matter halos to pre-stellar cores: High resolution follow-up of cosmological Lyman-Werner simulations
- Structure of the super-Eddington outflow and itsimpact on the cosmological scale
- Hungry or Not: How Stellar-Mass Black Holes Grow (or Don't) in Dark Matter Mini-Haloes at High-Resolution